Fundraising 101

It is not difficult to spend money, once you have it.
It is not difficult to raise money, once you know how to spend it wisely.

What's difficult is putting the two together.

Some donors know what to contribute to - they choose specific projects and people.
Some donors want to help achieve a general aim - they give to a foundation that will wisely spend the money for them (eg. Warren Buffet giving gazillions to Bill Gate's foundation).
Any sponsorship program should enable both ear-marked and general contributions (and I am certain if the paper-work's done right, this can be achieved within TPF).

To be frank, the ONLY reasonable systematic way of managing a sponsorship process is to have a Foundation, and the foundation should have people who are trusted, who already have contributed to the process, and who are prepared to report back on how the money has been spent. The Perl Foundation meets these criteria.

If you spend time on administration, you are using resources, in just the same way as programmers hacking on the code. So if the officers of the Foundation are paid for their efforts, that is acceptible so long as the payments are commensurate with resources spent in other directions.
It is not a mathematical formula, its a question of balance and fairness and transparency.

No one likes bureacracy. But I feel much happier about handing over money, or persuading someone else to hand over money, to a group of people with established procedures and collective responsibility, than to some enthusiatic individual who promises the earth and whose the world-number-one genius at code writing, but might also go and blow the whole lot on girls and booze cos his cat died.

Whilst debating issues like parrot vs pugs, or single-track vs parellel track development, can be quite interesting, especially if it induces Larry to compare straight lines to mountains and railroads, it is likely to be more useful to have suggestions like chromatic's - 1month of dedicated work for $5000.

How about adding a page to one of the web sites where offers of help, time and expense, can be made?

The micro-grants idea is great. What I have seen of the results and reporting is fine. More grants, more people, and more results are needed. How about everyone reading this thread thinking about a micro-project they can do.

Finally, there needs to be recognition for the sponsors, both those that donate their talent resources such as volunteer designer, implementors, & hackers, and those that donate just cash.

How about a mandatory section of text at the top of each core and sponsored module that lists the sponsors? Just like license text. That way all contributors are recognised when/if perl6 becomes the predominant programming environment, those names become distributed around the world.

Fundraising Cases for Supporting Perl 6 Development

Generically Oriented

Independent Software Vender (ISV) Oriented

Hardware Oriented

The advantages of Perl 6's adaptibility for more effectively exploiting the changing hardware landscape.

Open Source Oriented

Academically Oriented

The role of Perl 6, Parrot, and CPAN6 for developing extended multi-language infrastructure, leading to "programming's new Library of Alexandria" and "WikiCPAN6pedia".

Governmental

Much academic work in the USA is funded by federal grants. There is usually some sort of case involved for advancing the technological state of the art, for increasing economic competitiveness, and so on.